After
eleven minutes underwater at near-freezing temperature, Delaney Maxwell, who
appeared dead upon rescue, is revived.
Unlikely as her survival seems, the return of apparently normal brain
function seems even more unlikely, yet after a few days she is allowed to go
home with medications and resume a near-normal life. But after-effects of her trauma linger, the
most dramatic of which is that she develops a sixth sense about impending
death. She hides this recurrent
sensation from her parents, and from her best friend, Decker, who rescued her,
but finds that she shares the experience with a hospital aide who, like her,
suffered a coma after a car accident that killed his family members. Like her, he senses death in others. Gradually
Delaney realizes that “normal” isn’t a place she’s likely to return to, and
that Troy, the aide whose life has been a kind of “hell” since his own trauma,
is even further from normal than she.
Troy seems to feel that it is his mission to help hasten death for those
who are dying, to prevent prolonged suffering.
The story follows her efforts to stop him, and to communicate with close
friends, especially Decker, in spite of the
secret she carries about her own altered awareness. When her
efforts to save a friend who is dying of a seizure fail, Delaney faces another
moment of crisis, compounded by Troy’s own suicidal desire to end his own
suffering and hers with it. In the midst
of these new traumas a clarity she has lost about what it means to choose life
returns to her, and with it the possibility of a loving openness with parents and
friends about the mysteries of her own brain and heart.

When nine-year-old Rob Cole, child of poor 11th-century
English farmers, loses his mother, he is consigned to the care of a
barber-surgeon who takes him around the countryside, teaching him to juggle,
sell potions of questionable value, and assist him in basic medical care that
ranges from good practical first-aid to useless ritual. When, eight years later, his mentor dies, Rob
takes the wagon, horse, and trappings and embarks on a life-changing journey
across Europe to learn real medicine from Avicenna in Persia. Through a Jewish physician practicing in
England, he has learned that Avicenna’s school is the only place to learn real
medicine and develop the gift he has come to recognize in himself. In addition to skill, he discovers in
encounters with patients that he has sharp and accurate intuitions about their
conditions, but little learning to enable him to heal them. The journey with a caravan of Jewish
merchants involves many trials, including arduous efforts to learn Persian and
pass himself off as a Jew, since Christians are treated with hostility in the
Muslim lands he is about to enter.
Refused at first at Avicenna’s school, he finally receives help from the
Shah and becomes a star student. His
medical education culminates in travel as far as India, and illegal ventures
into the body as he dissects the dead under cover of darkness. Ultimately he marries the daughter of a
Scottish merchant he had met but parted with in his outgoing journey, and,
fleeing the dangers of war, returns with her and their two sons to the British
Isles, where he sets up practice in Scotland.

Best Boy is a novel about Todd Aaron, a
54-year-old autistic man who has lived for 40 years in a Payton LivingCenter
(sic); he was involuntarily committed to this facility. Todd has been in five previous
places for congregate living, but Payton seems to be the best for him, thanks
in part to a loving caregiver, Raykene. Todd has accepted the institutional
“Law” of Payton and takes his drugs right on schedule, including Risperdal, an antipsychotic
that slows him down, making a “roof” over him and muffling, he says, “the voice
in my brain.” The story is told from
Todd’s point of view, often with startling imagery: he pictures his dead parents turning into
giant cigars, a raindrop “explodes,” and, when upset, he rocks back and forth and
feels “volts.” Now and then he recalls
that his mother called him her “best boy.”

Into this
stable setting come three personified disruptions. The first two are fellow
patients, Terry Doon (a pun on “doom”?), a brain-injured roommate who teases,
torments, and bullies Todd, and Martine Calhoun. While Terry disrupts Todd’s
living space, Martine is a siren who lures him to different parts of Payton’s
campus; she is also a rebel who urges him to stop taking Risperdal and shows
him how to hide the drug in his hand and get rid of it later.

The third is Mike Hinton, a day staffer who lies,
manipulates, and in general mistreats Todd. Todd understands Hinton as evil and
entertains violence against him—but does not act. Hinton has sex with a female
patient who dies, apparently a suicide, although the language of Payton’s staff,
as reported by Todd, euphemistically hides the truth.

Todd has
the “Idea” of escape and sets out, on foot, to go 744 miles to “home.” A state
policeman soon returns him to Payton.

Now and then Todd’s younger brother
Nate calls, often while drinking. Near the end of the book, Nate and his wife
Beth take Todd to his childhood home, where he had been abused physically and
mentally. In a moving scene, Todd enters the only unchanged area, a crawl space
and feels the return he yearned for.

All three
tormentors leave Payton, and there is a surprising resolution for Todd. The balance and harmony of Payton’s
LivingCenter are restored, and Todd, reminded by Raykene, affirms that
“Somebody always loved me.”

This memoir focuses on the various ways in which his being
an African American affected Tweedy’s medical education and early practice as a
medical resident and later in psychiatry. Raised in the relative safety and
privilege of an intact family, he found himself underprepared for some of the
blatant forms of personal prejudice and institutional racism he encountered in
his first years of medical education at Duke Medical School. One shocking moment he recounts in some
detail occurred when a professor, seeing him seated in the lecture hall,
assumed he’d come to fix the lights.
Other distressing learning moments occur in his work at a clinic serving
the rural poor, mostly black patients, where he comes to a new, heightened
awareness of the socioeconomic forces that entrap them and how their lives and
health are circumscribed and often shortened by those forces. Well into his early years of practice he
notices, with more and more awareness of social contexts and political forces,
how the color line continues to make a difference in professional life, though
in subtler ways. The narrative recounts clearly
and judiciously the moments of recognition and decision that have shaped his
subsequent medical career.

Not God is a "play in verse" with two characters, a hospitalized patient and the patient's doctor. The scare quotes indicate the fluid quality of Not God, which the author originally conceived as a sequence of poems spoken in a patient's voice. Subsequently, he added the doctor poems (monologues) to create a "dialog" between the two voices. Once again, scare quotes suggest the atypical quality of this dialogue, since the two characters express different feelings and perspectives on the situation, but do not directly address one another. The play version has received several performances at colleges and small theaters.The patient speaks first in a monologue that begins "A man's cough bounces down the hallway / like pick up sticks... " and ends with "I am here two weeks." (p. 7) It soon becomes evident that he/she has cancer and is receiving chemotherapy. The doctor has changed this person's life by speaking "one word," after which "nothing / would ever be the same again." (p. 10). The patient is knowledgeable, accepting of his/her condition, a keen observer with a good sense of humor, as in "Doldrums" (p. 19) and "Cricket" (p. 23), and a person who affirms life in spite of adversity. The doctor is burdened with the power of medical knowledge. In particular, he understands the deadly meaning of signs and symptoms: "We say / excess water and swelling of the belly, knowing / full well... / an ovarian cancer is almost certain." (p. 33) But the meaning this represents is chaos: there is nothing humane or transcendent about cancer. Unlike his baseball card collection in childhood ("Shoebox," p. 35), cancer is neither confined nor orderly. In the second act, the patient sympathizes with the doctor whose "head is so cluttered / with obligatory data." Paradoxically, the doctor must be protected because he is "filled with dying." (p. 41) The doctor becomes angry with the burden, "Why / ask me a question that only God can answer?" (p. 49) and cries out that his work is "alchemy, / potions and witches' brews." (p. 54) In the end, while dying, the patient imagines "a bridge that can cross / the Atlantic." (p. 68), while the doctor speaks a prayer, "The word cure, dear God, is always / near my lips, though I have been constrained from / saying it aloud." (p. 66)

This fine collection of work by Audrey Shafer is subtitled "Poems by a Doctor/Mother." The book begins with a section containing poems of personal history and experience ("that I call home"), descends into the nether world of anesthesia ("not quite sleep"), and in the final section returns to the light with a new perspective on the texture and occurrences of ordinary life ("okay for re-entry").Among the more medically oriented poems, see especially "Spring," "Anesthesia," "Three Mothers," Monday Morning (see annotation in this database), "Gurney Tears," "Center Stage," and "Reading Leaves." "Don’t Start, Friend" takes up the topic of substance abuse among anesthesiologists (or physicians, in general).

The author poetically describes the neurological deficits left by his patient’s third stroke. Her misshapen words are "small stones and loose particles of meaning "as he attempts to understand her. Her husband, however, states that "her gulps don’t make no sense," emphasizing his perception of the hopelessness of the situation.

This poem describes how, during the anatomy lesson, the medical student feels curiosity about the wonders of the human body. He is torn between his desire for knowledge and the horror he feels in cutting up a dead body: "the violence of abomination." This marks a transitional point in the student’s medical career path.

The physician-narrator ponders the symbolic significance of the tool that typifies his profession, the stethoscope. Through it he has heard "the sound of creation"--the sound of life to be born--and the absence of sound that signals death. Should he, therefore, treat the stethoscope as if it were a religious icon?"Never! Yet I could praise it." Were he to praise it, he would "celebrate my own ears" that can hear "Night cries / of injured creatures" and "the wind / traveling from where it began."

In the first part of this four part poem, the medical student climbs “stone-murky steps” to the Dissecting Room, as London is being bombed during World War II. In the second part, the student asks his cadaver, “Who are you?” Probing deeply, cutting the meat, the student concludes that the cadaver was never really a person, the right hand “never held, surely, another hand in greeting / or tenderness . . . . ” In the next part it becomes clear that because of the student’s flip attitude, he hadn’t been invited by the hospital priest to the memorial service for cadavers.Finally, the speaker (now for many years a physician) reflects again on his old question about the cadaver’s identity. He realizes that the cadaver’s name is the name on every gravestone, that his figure is the figure on every human portrait, “always in disguise.” At the end, the physician goes on with his daily activities, climbing the stairs to his bedroom and winding his clock.